


just don't let go

by Babydoll Ria (Babydoll_Ria)



Series: Ficmas 2014 [6]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 15:39:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3493739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Babydoll_Ria/pseuds/Babydoll%20Ria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wants to stab the pen in her face if she won't stop drumming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just don't let go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ambpersand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambpersand/gifts).



So, if you don’t brace for the impact, cliff diving can break your nose.  It’s something in twenty-three years, he’s never known and which is why he is currently stuck in the ER with an ice pack on his nose and a migraine from the girl in a wheel chair tap-tap-tapping her pen against the metal arm.

‘Do you mind?’ he asks, after two hours of the white noise of the people leaving the ER, and the television on mute with the news on instead of the game.

She starts, green eyes narrowing and he wonders once again why she is here.

‘Nope,’ she pops the word, and there’s not a reprieve, but an increase in the rhythm.

He contemplates throwing the ice pack at her, but he figures he’d never get it back.

* * *

 

He has to spend the night because he broke the bridge of his nose and he needs reconstructive surgery and now he’s got an all inclusive thank god for health care stay in a twin hospital bed away from the window.

He’s not happy, but it’s not a big deal.

He tells his Grandma Mags what’s going on and she tells him Grandpa Woof and her are driving down that night so they can be there when he gets out of surgery.

He complains and argues but there’s no winning with a southern grandma so he’s got a restless night of settling with an empty stomach until he gets the surgery.

* * *

 

When he comes to, there’s creole French and the sound of a monitor static and plaster on his face that itches just too oddly for his comfort.

‘Finnick,’ Mags says, ‘you’re awake.’ There’s a tension in her voice that he doesn’t like.

‘Tell me something Gran,’ he asks and he’s surprised at how dry his voice is. ‘Am I still beautiful?’

‘Oh Finnick,’ Mags says kindly. ‘You are my beautiful, handsome, kind grandson.’

‘So they messed up,’ he summarises and Woof releases a bark of laughter from the corner, where he looms.

‘You fergot modest Mags,’ Woof says.

‘When can I go?’

‘They just need to run a few tests, dear,’ Mags tells him. ‘You’re T-bone count was high. So they’re just making sure it’s not a reactant to the medicine.’

‘My t-bone?’

‘T-cell she means.’

‘You bloody know what I mean,’ Mags huffs and Woof catches his grandson’s eye where they share a smile.

They all know what happen next.

* * *

 

He doesn’t get to go back to the cottage, instead he ends up moving wings to the oncology one and he spends a lot of timing getting blood drawn.

It’s not his idea of his final summer before graduation but he can’t do anything about that now, and he’s learnt that Nurse Mason is more of a bitch the more you argue about the injections so he just gives her a wide shit-eating grin as she tries to find his veins.

It’s on his third day, when he sees the girl with the long hair and the stupid pen from the ER, wearing a hospital gown laughing with Nurse Mason in the TV lounge.

‘You!’ he blurts, surprised to see her. She seemed fine a week ago, if not particularly annoying.

She turns, and recognition flashes on her face, ‘Broken nose boy.’

‘Annoying drummer girl,’ he retorts.

‘You two know each other?’ Nurse Mason smirks.

‘Not really,’ drummer girl says. ‘We were in the ER together and he was an ass.’

‘I asked you to stop drumming!’

‘An ass.’

‘How the hell is that being an ass?’

‘I was minding my own business and then out of nowhere you yell at me!’

‘ _It was two hours of you hitting the side of the fucking wheelchair with a pen._ ’

‘Play nice kids,’ Nurse Mason says mildly, though he would bet his right hand and all the healthy t-cells in his body that she’s thoroughly entertained. He knows she’s the unofficial judge of the wheelchair drag races that happen after visiting hours, for all the people in the ward bored out of their skull. ‘I’ve got to do my rounds, so when I get back, Annie please do not strangle him.’

Drummer girl glowers at him, he sticks out his tongue.

They are silent in the TV lounge, the only people not interested in the broadcasted wedding of It couple Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark for _Mellark’s Bakery_ the hottest reality TV show out there.

‘Annie, right?’ he asks, and she nods. ‘I’m Finnick.’

‘…hi,’ she says finally.

‘So what are you in for?’  he asks conversationally. She raises an eyebrow at him, and he just smirks. There’s no harm in a question, where the answer is obvious.

‘Ovarian cancer,’ she tells him. ‘You?’

‘Plasma cell myeloma,’ he says easily. After ten years, it’s still amazing how he can say that name with a roll of the tongue. When he was fourteen it took practising every day to get the words to sound right, official, clinical without a trace of pity; because if you gave yourself pity, other people would just see you as that poor cancer boy.

‘I thought you just broke your nose,’ Annie says.

He shrugs, ‘I did. But they checked the t-cells and well…guess remission isn’t that long.’

‘How long?’

‘It would have been ten years in October.’

‘Fuck,’ Annie says and she looks genuinely sorry. ‘That sucks.’

‘Well they caught it really early this time, so.’ He changes the subject. ‘How about you?’

‘Eighteen,’ she says and there’s bitterness and anger in her tone. ‘I was eighteen, and then when I was twenty, and now it’s back.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Yeah.’

* * *

 

He doesn’t see her for three more days, until he comes back from a low dose of chemo, and Nurse Mason telling him that Doctor Abernathy would like to talk to him soon to discuss treatment options. He nods along, feeling a bit like he’s in a dream or a fog. He has tried his hardest to block these memories out, and besides Mags was the one who paid the most attention, while he just showed up.

But there’s the sound of breaking…something and screams or sobs muffled badly by a pillow coming out from room 470, marked in a haphazard scrawl as A. Cresta.

He really shouldn’t go see her, whatever she’s dealing with, he has not part of it but it doesn’t sound like anyone else is coming to help her, or cares.

He pushes open the door, and there she is, barefoot in overturned pills, food and whatever else was on the tray she was given, looking like she’s trying to suffocate herself with the lumpy pillow in the blue cotton pillowcase.

He closes the door behind him, and she stiffens, letting the pillow drop a bit so he can see wild  green eyes with dark smudges of eyeliner and mascara circling them.

‘Get out,’ she snarls.

‘Yeah, sure,’ he nods, leaning against the door.  ‘Soon as you tell me why you felt the need to waste this perfect good cherry jell-o.’

‘Finnick get the fuck out of her before I fucking-‘

‘See, the thing about this whole cancer thing,’ he says over top of her, ‘is that there’s really nothing to do. So your mental breakdown is actually really funny.’

‘Get out-‘

‘Why don’t you tell me why you’re giving CPR to that pillow,’

The thing about pushing someone, poking and prodding them until you get whatever result you wanted is that they push back.

‘They have to take out my uterus,’ Annie says glaring at him.

He stops talking.

‘It,’ she struggles with the words. ‘It’s spread to my colon and my stomach lining and fuck…they…they’re taking my uterus. So now you fucking know, will you please get out so I can scream by myself?’

He should leave; he should because she is making it very obvious on this too hot August day that she wants nothing to do with him. But he’s seen her, she avoids the other patients, she never has any visitors. She only talks to Nurse Mason, and even then it was only that one time.

But this isn’t something someone should deal with alone.

So he sits in the chair.

‘I told you to get out.’

‘I know,’ he says softly, and it’s not pity in his voice because he knows pity will get him nowhere. ‘I just think you shouldn’t be alone right now.’

‘You’re not my friend, you don’t know me,’ she spits.

He nods, ‘But this is big. And I just can’t leave you alone like this.’

She glares at him, and goes back to screaming in her pillow.

* * *

 

Doctor Abernathy says they’re going to try to do a bone marrow transplant, hopefully it will work this time and he’s on the list. But finding a match is hard, so he’s got to wait it out.

He hasn’t seen Annie at all, since then. She hasn’t left her room in two weeks. He’s worried. When he knocks on her door, he hears something muttered that sounds a lot like “Fuck off”, he pushes the door open anyway.

‘Fuck off,’ Annie says from a curled up bundle on the arm chair set by the window.

‘No,’ he says shutting the door. ‘Two weeks is enough to be all pissy.’

‘I’m sorry-are you missing an internal organ? No? Then you don’t get an opinion,’ she snarls.

‘You’re not dead, are you?’

‘I can’t have children,’ she says, twisting to glare at him.

He stops short, stilling at the unmade bed with the lunch untouched on the tray. ‘Shit, sorry.’

‘It’s fine,’ she laughs, strangled laced with it’s not fine.  ‘I’m only twenty-two. I never-fuck I didn’t think about kids but now-fuck.’

He doesn’t know what to say, he’s not used to planning about the future-a live in the moment kind of guy that comes from facing mortality at fourteen. He’s never thought of marriage, of children or any of that. He doesn’t know if Annie did but in a vague abstract dream like way, he’s thought of children as a nice maybe.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says again.

‘Don’t be, I’m not dead right?’

* * *

 

He doesn’t go back to school, not because he doesn’t want to get his degree but because he’s too sick to leave the hospital, so it’s easier for him to take the year off then try to do online courses. It stings, he’s already a bit behind with fourteen in the hospital, and taking a few years to see the world before coming back to school at twenty.

Annie, from what he knows from the few times he sees her, is doing her coursework online. She’s still too sick to leave the hospital, but she’s making sure she graduates.

‘She wants to be a physicist,’ Nurse Mason says as she wheels him to chemo. It’s a stupid hospital policy that keeps him in the wheelchair and he’s pretty sure she’s ramming him into carts on purpose.  ‘Said she never wants to let it keep her down.’

‘She’s stronger than me,’ he comments.

Nurse Mason shrugs, ‘Maybe. You find out what people are made of in stuff like this.’

* * *

 

October comes and he sees more and more of Annie, but not because she wants to, but because Doctor Abernathy and a stream of nurses and specialists come in and out of the room. 

He finds that after treatment, she’s less likely to yell at him so he ends up sitting in the arm chair watching _Mellark’s Bakery_ reruns and making fun of how stupid it all is.

She looks smaller, shrinking in the pale blue hospital gown, more swallow and jaundice but he doesn’t commit on it-he doesn’t have a right to and the last time he did, she threw the jell-o at him.

On a Thursday, the last one in October she’s wheeled back into his room, and he has pizza (she needs to keep up a weight to do chemo) and she’s glowing, positively glowing.

‘They say that I can get discharged next week,’ she tells him. ‘I’m going home.’

‘Oh,’ he says, something inside him burns. This is good, very good. And yes he’s a bit jealous that she gets to go home, while his T-cells are being little fuckers; but she’s going to be gone and he’ll miss their reality binges. ‘Oh that’s great.’

‘I know,’ she smiles like a solar eclipse and it’s blinding.

* * *

 

He’s in chemo when she gets moved out on Monday. He doesn’t get to say goodbye or meet her sorority sisters, or her dad.

He doesn’t even know her phone number or her email-there was no need when she was five doors down.

He doesn’t say goodbye.

* * *

 

‘Odair,’  Doctor Abernathy says, stopping Nurse Mason from wheeling him back to floor four. ‘Hey, so Cresta is back in the hospital.’

‘What?’ he echoes.

‘She came back last night,’ Doctor Abernathy continues gruffly. ‘You’re her friend. Thought you should know.’

There’s patient-doctor confidentiality, and he’s sure the doctor is breaking it but he doesn’t really care.

‘Oh, okay,’ he says. ‘I’ll go visit her. Same room?’

‘No,’ Doctor Abernathy isn’t looking at him, finding the tile on the floor more important. Nurse Mason isn’t looking at him either. ‘She’s on the thirteenth floor.’

The thirteenth floor is a morbid joke. It’s hospice care.

It’s the chemo that makes him vomit.

* * *

 

He comes to visit her the next day.

He lingers around the door, unable to decide to visit or not. He flickers like a light switch, trying to balance in the middle. They aren’t friends, not the type who would hang out outside of the hospital, but they aren’t enemies. He watched her bawl at _Say Yes To The Dress_ , and pretend the Everlark divorce because of Gale Hawthorne on _Mellark’s Bakery_ wasn’t the high light of her Friday night.

‘Are you coming in?’ Annie asks, but it’s not the same voice. There’s a loss of tone, something that sounds like she’s giving up.

‘Are you going to throw Jell-o at me?’ he asks, leaning against the door.

She laughs, ‘Didn’t you hear? When you move to the thirteenth floor, you get real people food.’

‘Damn, what do I need to do to get up here?’ he says and then cringes.

She smiles mirthlessly. ‘Apparently have your body self –destruct.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’

‘I still am.’

* * *

 

It’s Friday morning, and it doesn’t feel different. He doesn’t feel anything that ache on his heart, or anything like they say you do.

He finds out at eleven that she died.


End file.
